What the Standard Financial Statement actually is
The SFS is a single, agreed layout for showing what you earn and what you spend, used across the UK debt advice sector so that every creditor is reading the same page.
Before the SFS, every charity and creditor used its own budget form, and a repayment offer that satisfied one would be rejected by another. The Standard Financial Statement, run by the Money and Pensions Service, replaced that with one format and one set of spending guidelines. When a debt adviser submits an SFS to your creditors, they recognise the categories and the benchmarks behind them, which is why an offer backed by an SFS carries weight. This builder mirrors those sections so the figures you bring to an adviser are already in the right shape.
How this pre-assessment builder works
It is a guided version of the same exercise a debt adviser does with you — done at your own pace, privately, before the appointment.
- Set your household. Single or couple, plus dependent children. This decides which guideline figures your flexible spending is measured against, because a family of four is expected to spend more on food than one person.
- Enter monthly figures, section by section. Income first, then housing, utilities, food, transport, personal costs, communications and leisure, and finally debt payments. Enter everything as a monthly amount — if a bill is weekly or annual, the Budget Planner will convert it for you.
- Watch the guideline flags. On the flexible categories, the builder shows a gentle warning if your figure sits well above the typical guideline. It never blocks you — plenty of budgets have a good reason to be higher — it just shows you the lines a creditor is most likely to ask about.
- Read your summary and export. The final screen shows income versus outgoings, your disposable income, a spending breakdown and every flagged category, then lets you download a PDF to take to your appointment.
What your disposable income is telling you
Disposable income is the single number an adviser and your creditors care about most: what is left after every essential and minimum payment.
A healthy positive figure means you have room to make an arrangement or to clear debt faster yourself — this is exactly the surplus the debt snowball and debt avalanche methods put to work. A figure near zero, or negative, is not a failure of budgeting; it is usually the clearest sign that a repayment calculator is not the right next step and that a formal solution — a debt management plan, an IVA, or in England and Wales the Breathing Space scheme — deserves a look. Either way, the number points you at the right kind of help. The guide to what a debt management plan is explains what happens if you take a completed SFS to a free adviser.
Priority debts come first, always
The builder deliberately keeps housing and utilities in their own early sections, because those are priority debts — rent or mortgage, council tax and energy carry enforcement powers that credit cards do not. On an SFS they are paid before anything is offered to non-priority creditors. If bringing priority bills up to date leaves nothing for your cards, that is important information to walk into your appointment already knowing.
Why the guideline figures are illustrative
The real SFS trigger figures — the benchmark spending levels creditors check against — are confidential to the organisations that subscribe to the Standard Financial Statement. They are not published for public tools to use. So this builder compares your spending against its own illustrative guideline figures, based on typical household spending, purely to show you which lines tend to attract questions. Treat a flag as a prompt to have your explanation ready, not as a rule. The figures a real adviser uses may differ, and a well-evidenced higher cost is perfectly allowed.